Heroes Of The Write Stuff

An article in the financial section of today’s Guardian pegs a discussion of the current dismal state of highstreet bookshops in Britain on the story of how two heroes have made a success of an independent bookshop, Crockatt & Powell, near Waterloo station. Adam Powell used to work in Waterstones in Islington, one of my local bookshops, and he’s right on the mark when he comments about how depressing this once vibrant branch has become. Like all chain bookshops, its front of house is almost entirely taken up with three-for-two tables, with no sign of any individuality or attempt to cater to what Powell calls the hardcore customers - they people who buy 50-100 books a year.

Although the article is rightly scathing about the damage caused by the craven attitude of most publishers to supermarkets (and if you think Waterstones is dispiriting, check out the book shelves of a big Asda or Tescos), and doesn’t touch on the fact that almost all of the books displayed front-of-house in chains are there because the publishers have paid bungs to put them there. It costs publishers to get recommendations from chains too; it costs them even more to get their book in the window displays. It’s a scam that still doesn’t seem to be general knowledge. It’s almost killed off the midlist because no publisher is going to pay to promote a hardback thatwill probably sell no more than 2000 copies, or a paperback that won’t sell more than 5000 copies. And it’s killing off the chains because people who buy only a few books a year can get their fix at bargain prices at supermarkets, while discerning customers (who buy the most books) are fed up with being told what they should buy, and with shops that don’t stock what they’re looking for. A big hurrah, then, for people like Matthew Crockatt and Adam Powell, and let’s hope that the plan by Waterstone’s chief executive to makeover his shops so that they are able to ‘serve local communities’ succeeds without dumbing down their stocking policy in a vain attempt to match the brute buying power of the supermarkets. And if only there was some way that publishers, who are *losing money* on supermarket deals, would get together and agree to stop giving ridiculous discounts...

My own current reading? I’ve just finished Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland, a graphic novel that uses Lewis Carroll’s connections with Sunderland as the core of a phantasmagorical exploration of the tangled history of the town and its inhabitants. Provoking and poignant psychogeography that weaves a rich tapestry from individual human stories and lovingly burlesques all kinds of graphic stylings. And I’ve just started Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet, a sure-footed thriller set in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, effortlessly carried by the strong and deceptively simple voice of its hero, Easy Rawlins.

The End Of The Beginning

It’s no more than a coincidence, but I can’t resist noting that as Cassini makes another pass close to Titan, I’ve finally reached the end of the first draft of the first of two Quiet War novels, with a penultimate scene down on the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, in the caldera of a volcano.
It’s been a long haul. The novel is supposed to be around 150,000 words. I seem to have committed 200,000 so far, with a few scenes missing and a couple truncated. But on the whole it’s better to come out long than short. Now it’s cut, cut, cut, and polish, polish, polish. My favourite part of the writing process, if truth be told. Because now I have a first draft with a beginning and an end, and an endless middle, I know that I have a novel. And hopefully, somewhere in this mass of verbiage, there’s something like the novel I had in mind when I started it, good grief, back in October. (I was interrupted by a rewrite and polish of Cowboy Angels after the editing process, but still: one thing I’ve learnt, it doesn’t get any easier.)

Something like . . . Some writers plan everything with ruthless thoroughness before setting out. Others polish one chapter before starting the next, so that when they reach that last full stop, they have, more or less, the finished object. As far as I’m concerned, the first draft is a kind of exploration of the territory within the boundaries set when I first had the idea for the novel. There are things in that territory that are smaller and far more insignificant than I believed them to be when I started out, and other things that have a far greater significance. And then there are the things, to lapse into a brief Rumsfeldian mode, that I didn’t know I knew, and the characters who somehow managed to rewrite their parts to get a lot more time than I thought they would have, way back when. The discoveries that make the long labour worthwhile.

The Only Ones

I've been a fan of The Only Ones ever since my flatmate bought their first single ('Lovers of Today'/'Peter and the Pets'), and used to see them regularly in concert because I was living in Bristol back then, in the late 1970s, and their tours always seemed to finish there (I think their lead guitarist, John Perry, came from the area). They broke up in inglorious circumstances involved improbably amounts of drugs in the early 1980s, but now they're back. Truly, nothing is impossible in this strange, wonderful world. Time to dig out my 12 inch disc of 'Another Girl, Another Planet' before returning to Titan and the final haul . . .

Now Hear This

Alan Kaster of AudioText tells me that ‘Second Skin’ has just been released as a Great Science Fiction Stories audio selection. Check out their list.

‘Second Skin’ was the first of the Quiet War stories, and I’m steadily reaching the end of a novel that draws on them, although there’s been some rearrangement of the furniture for the current narrative dance. It’s been, good grief, ten years since ‘Second Skin’ was first published, and the series didn’t so much evolve as grow in various odd and whimsical directions. Rather than try to patch up their common background, I’ve dismantled it and rebuilt it. Only way to get it humming like a turbojet . . .

Re:interpretate

Elizabeth Nguyen writes to tell me that she, Mya Dosch, and Dominic Vendell wrote, directed and acted in this interpretation of the science in my novel White Devils as a visual aid for a presentation for their Biotechnology: Health and Society class. She adds: ‘Unfortunately, it is not at its completion - in its live showing each 'biotech' moment was accompanied by a brief description of a biotechnology mentioned in your book. Enjoy!’

I wonder if I convince my publishers that this would be a great way of advertising Cowboy Angels. It would involve rather a lot of guns though. And a cat in a box.

Tick Tock

Why not submit a story for the clockpunk anthology?

(link via boingboing)

No Future

This is sad: NASA is to close its Institute for Advanced Concepts because of lack of money to keep it going. Apparently, every cent is needed for more immediate projects, including developing the new Orion exploration vehicle, a bigger version of the Apollo capsule, and meeting its goal of returning to the moon, and landing astronauts on Mars. But if even NASA can’t fund blue skies thinking and research into the feasibility of space elevators, novel robot explorers and antimatter space sails, and much more, the future of the future is just a little bit bleaker.

On a happier note, there’s a serious proposal that the new Orion vehicle could be used to land astronauts on a near Earth asteroid.

Re: renaissance

Apparently, I’ve written a pioneering clockpunk novel. Cool.

As I was saying . . .

If only I was one of those writers who produce a book every two years - or even less frequently. Right now, I’d be celebrating the publication of Players by taking an extended holiday after having been wafted round an extensive signing tour. Or something. Instead, I’m caught up in a first draft hurtling towards its conclusion, and I’ve just received the copy-edited manuscript of Cowboy Angels, which I have to get back to the publishers so they can get bound proofs ready for the London Book Fair, in the middle of the next month. Busy, busy, busy . . .

On Tuesday, I went up to Leicester to debate with the inestimable Ian Watson whether or not we’re headed for a utopian or dystopian future, in front of a ferociously intelligent and well-informed audience. I travelled by train out of St Pancras, the first time I’ve been there in a few years. In November, it will open fully as the new Eurostar terminal, and from the Midland Mainline platforms you can get a wonderful view of William Henry Barlow’s trainshed roof, the ironwork painted sky blue and the glass sparklingly clean. This, and the huge engineering works to create a new line to the Channel Tunnel, has been progressing more or less invisibly under Londoner’s feet, and is right on schedule. I’m looking forward to being able to take a fifteen minute stroll from my home down to St Pancras where I can catch a train and be whisked to Paris is less than two hours. Now that’s progress.

Just out this week is Future Weapons of War, an anthology edited by Joe Haldeman and Martin Greenburg which features a story of mine. It’s published by Baen Books, famous for their military SF; I haven’t yet seen a copy, but I would guess that the likes of Greg Benford and Kristine Kathryn Rusch may have come up with some neat twists on the eponymous theme.
My story, ‘Rocket Boy’, starts like this:

Rocket Boy lived under the knot of ferroconcrete ribbons where the road from the spaceport joined the beltway that girdled the city. He’d made a kind of nest in a high ledge beneath the slope of an on-ramp, and although traffic rumbled overhead day and night, it was as cozy and safe as anywhere on the street because it could be reached only by squeezing through a kind of picket fence of squat, close-set columns. Even so, Rocket Boy clutched a knife improvised from the neck of a broken bottle while he slept in his nest of packing excelsior, charity blankets and cardboard. The first lesson he’d learned on the street was that you needed to carry a weapon with you at all times.

Ancient History

This year is the 25th anniversary of Interzone, Britain’s only science fiction magazine. Its present publisher, Andy Cox, asked a bunch of writers for a paragraph about their involvment with Interzone over the years. Here’s my answer.

Summer 1987, Brighton, the World Science Fiction Convention. I'm a new
author with a couple of short stories to my name and a forthcoming novel
that only Malcolm Edwards and I know about. Malcolm is an editor with
Gollancz, Gollancz is hosting the pre-Hugo Award party, and my
unpublished novel gets me a ticket. In the press, a dapper young gent
squints at my name badge. 'Paul McAuley? I thought "King of the Hill"
was pretty good.' 'King of the Hill' was the second story of mine that
Interzone published; that was how I met Kim Newman.* What did
Interzone do for me? It plugged me into the science fiction community,
gentle reader, and turned me on. It was no small thing.

*I like to think that Kim said 'pretty good', but it's possible that he
may have said 'interesting' instead. Kim spent his childhood in
Somerset and that's where 'King of the Hill' is set, so whether or not
he thought it any good, he would have found it of interest.

Cracking It

I was trying to understand timelike curves in Einsteinian spacetime today (the things you need to know to write a novel - there’s a cult whose leader believes he is getting messages from his future self from a planet around another star, which means that faster-than-light travel will soon be invented). And while reading about it in Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality (Chapter 17), I had a sudden lovely little moment of epiphany where the whole thing became utterly transparent. This isn’t exactly world-shattering stuff, and had a lot more to do with Penrose’s lucid explication than my intelligence, as I've always found physics non-intuitive, but like Proust’s madeleine dipped in lime tea, this mental state brought back a few moments from my career in science when I suddenly understood how something worked, and knew that I knew something that no one else in the world knew.

Advertisment For Myself

Players is published today. Here’s what it’s about, according to the blurb on the back:

A teenage girl found naked and fatally injured in mountain forest two hundred miles from her home.

The mutilated corpse of a young man in the Nevada desert, his heart and eyes removed.
The post-apocalyptic world of a role-playing computer game - and the murderous spee of a psychopathic killer driven by delusions of superhuman supremancy.

And rookie detective Summer Ziegler, pitched headlong into her first major case. But even as she tries to unpick the killer’s twisted logic, he lures her into a cat-and-mouse game with a spectacular climax of his own devising . . .

Buy a copy or two, and keep my sponsors happy. Why, I might even be able to afford to keep posting stuff here. American readers might like to note that at present there are no plans for a U.S. edition, so amazon.co.uk is your friend.

Here Come The Suits

One character in Players scrapes a living by winning virtual weapons and treasures in online Massively Multiplayer games and auctioning them off via eBay. Another runs a business that uses teenage labour to set up virtual characters and do all the boring, repetitive labour of providing them with skill-sets and attributes before selling them to cash-rich, time-poor players who can’t be bothered to do the work for themselves. Luckily, I decided to set the novel in the present of its composition, 2006, rather than in the near future; a week before its publication, eBay announced that it is banning the sale of virtual objects, currency, and characters on its site.

This throws a hefty spanner into the burgeoning virtual economy based on trading of objects and money that exist only in digital form, and undercuts the long-established assumption that this real-money trading is an established part of online gaming. In fact, most companies that run online games prohibit RMT in their terms of service, and eBay seems to be not only clamping down on an area where fraud is rampant, but also anticipating legal arguments about intellectual property rights (it’s still allowing auctions of Second Life property, because Second Life’s publisher, Linden Lab, encourages players to trade goods), as well as the interest by some governments in regulating and taxing RMT. With Sony Online setting up its own 'Station Exchange' service and the rise of third-party trading sites like IGE, it looks like the Wild West days of online gaming’s virtual economy may be coming to an end. The cutting edge of the electronic frontier gets civilized faster than Deadwood: one moment it’s all wild-cat prospectors and gun-slingers; the next it’s banks, mining companies and the feds. Any day now, I expect the Mob to move in.

Altered Ego

According to this, I’m really Stanislav Lem (link via boingboing). Which is nice. After all, it’s about the only way I’m ever going to get within punting distance of a Nobel Prize.

A Little Light Research

I've posted on the website a brief piece about a trip to Oregon to do some background research for Players.

In the Pines

A couple of the reasons for setting Players in Oregon were the extensive forests along the coast, and the wonderful idiosyncrasy of a significant proportion of the people living there. Where else would you find someone turning an airliner into a home, in the middle of the woods?

The Blues

Actually, you'd get a better idea of the cover of Cowboy Angels if Blogger for some reason didn't include red in its palette when reproducing uploaded pictures. Which is a pity, as the dominate tone of the cover is, er, red. Hopefully, this is the last recursive post I make for some time, but if anyone happens to know how to post pictures that end up looking like the originals...

First Sighting

This is the cover rough for Cowboy Angels, which is slowly moving into production. I may be biased, but I think it very fine. The discrete open door (which you may have a hard time seeing in this low rez post) is highly significant, by the way.

The Sorrows of Young Hannibal

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising, which gives us the origin myth of his most famous creation, Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter, displays Harris’s flair for concise narration and grand Guignol effects (as well as his weakness for tagging Hannibal’s victims with physically or morally repulsive characters, and his obvious dislike of the human herd), but it never quite lays to rest the feeling that it’s a franchise cash-in. After all, it is no more than an elaboration of a few pages of flashback in its predecessor, Hannibal, and a flashback that itself seemed pretty unnecessary, given that it attempted to explain the motivation of a monster who boasted to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, ‘Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.’

The movie version of the novel shares this problem of redundancy, but like the novel it’s by no means as bad as it could have been. Apart from some necessary elisions and compressions, it sticks fairly close to the novel - not much of a surprise, given that Harris wrote the screenplay. In 1944, Hannibal Lecter’s family hide in the summer lodge when the Russian advance sweeps through their Lithuanian estate. His mother and father and their servants are killed in a firefight between a Russian tank and a Nazi Stuka; then a band of ragged looters take over the lodge and kill and eat his little sister, Mischa. Hannibal escapes, and after eight years flees a Soviet orphanage, and makes his way across Europe to France and his only surviving relative, the Japanese widow of his uncle. Plagued by nightmare flashbacks, he exacts a horrible revenge on a butcher who insults his aunt, and becomes a medical student and hones the skills he requires to track down the war criminals who murdered his sister.

It’s a handsomely staged period movie, with good direction by Peter Webber (who previously helmed Girl With A Pearl Earring), and despite a variety of Mittle-European accents the actors acquit themselves well. Gong Li brings a watchful stillness and quiet resolve to the part of Lady Murasaki, Hannibal’s aunt (although one wonders why a Japanese actress wasn’t given the role); Rhys Ifans plays Gaspar, the leader of the war criminals, with eye-rolling relish; and Gaspard Ulliel is a striking and devilishly gleeful young Hannibal. What the movie lacks, as does the novel, is a suitable antagonist for Hannibal to measure himself against. In The Silence of the Lambs he played cat-and-mouse games with Clarice Starling and in Hannibal he was chased not only by Starling but also by a venial Italian police inspector and his only surviving victim. In Hannibal Rising, Lady Murasaki does little more than fret over Hannibal’s monstrous descent, the French detective who investigates his trail of murders, Inspector Popil (played by The Wire’s Dominic West), is an incidental nuisance issuing impotent warnings, and until the final reel Gaspar is mostly offstage.

All that’s left is a series of increasingly gruesome set-piece variations on the theme of decapitation as Hannibal slashes through the ranks of the war criminals until he reaches their leader. There’s some small tension when Gaspar kidnaps Lady Murasaka, but it’s too little, too late. And although the movie tries to make something of the possibility that Hannibal can make a Faustian choice between good and evil, there’s little to be wrung from it because we already know what Hannibal will choose, and in any case Inspector Popil, echoing Red Dragon’s Will Graham, tells us that the human part of Hannibal died in the forest during World War Two, giving birth to the monster. And despite Ulliel’s hypnotic performance, it’s hard to muster sympathy for Hannibal’s devil, which makes his revenge all the more unpalatable.

Coming Attractions

The paperback was never quite out of print, but I’m pleased to announce that Gollancz will be republishing Fairyland in their new Modern Classics series, along with Stephen Baxter’s Evolution, Greg Bear’s Blood Music, Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, Christopher Priest’s The Seperation, Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space, and Dan Simmons’s Hyperion. All with neat, graphic-design covers, coming to a bookshop or online merchant near you in August.

Meanwhile, I’ve been told that Players will feature in a front-of-store promotion in Waterstone’s next month. This is Good Stuff, as an awful lot of foot traffic (ie potential book purchasers) doesn’t make it past the barricade of front tables with their come-hither special offers, 3 for 2 stickers, and velcro filaments that attach to you while the book squawks buy me or my pet dog will die in the plaintive voice of a big-eyed starving orphan...